


pondus, pondera

by spqr



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Age Difference, Aged-Up Peter Parker, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Alternate Universe - Prostitution, Angst, Dubious Consent, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Identity Reveal, M/M, No dubcon between main pairing, No underage between main pairing, Protective Tony Stark, Underage Prostitution, banter: the fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-17
Updated: 2020-01-17
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:42:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22288090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spqr/pseuds/spqr
Summary: Peter sells his virginity for $5,000 when he’s fifteen.
Relationships: Peter Parker/Tony Stark
Comments: 41
Kudos: 925





	pondus, pondera

**Author's Note:**

> me, trying to pass tropey schlock off as poetic: ah yes, a latin title. perfect.

Peter sells his virginity for $5,000 when he’s fifteen.

It’s stupid. He knows it’s stupid, because he’s not an idiot--he’s a straight-A student on full academic scholarship to one of the best public schools in New York, and on top of that he’s sat through enough stranger danger talks to fill one of the more modest volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But May breaks her leg and can’t work for a month, and their savings are dwindling and the medical bills are piling up and the odd jobs Peter picks up with Mr. Delmar and Ned’s mom and the grocer’s down the block are barely enough to feed them, let alone pay for cab fare to the hospital and their broken radiator and duct tape to hold his sneakers together.

Quentin Beck approaches him on the subway home from school, right after Ned’s stop. He has a kind face, he leaves Peter plenty of space to move away if he wants to, and he’s easy to talk to--he starts by saying he likes Peter’s _Spaceballs 2: The Quest for More Money_ t-shirt, then after they’ve swapped a couple quotes he says, “You look like a smart kid, but I gotta say, your sneakers are--really, they’re on their last gasp. They’re dying.”

Peter shrugs. “Yeah, I know. I thought the white duct tape would kinda mask it, but--“

“Look, if you ever want to make some easy money, you give me a call.” Beck slips him a green business card with a strange silver sheen.

“Mysterio Arrangements,” Peter reads. “What are you, some sort of florist?”

Beck laughs. “No. Not exactly.”

The train slows into a station, and Beck hops up out of his seat. “No pressure,” he says, still smiling as more passengers move past him to the door, “but jobs don’t stay open forever. So. Don’t dawdle.” He moves into the vestibule. “And, hey! May the schwartz be with you.”

Peter grins ear to ear as Beck disappears out the doors, and then he keeps grinning, looking at the card in his hands, turning it back and forth and watching it shimmer under the fluorescents, feeling this welcome optimism in his chest that maybe, _maybe_ , he’s gotten lucky for once. Screw Parker luck, things are about to get better. So he gets home and he rushes through his homework and then runs down the block to the grocer’s for his shift and then runs back for dinner and then, when he’s finally alone in his room with May asleep down the hall, he psychs himself up and calls Beck. Beck answers on the first ring. “Uh,” Peter says. “It’s me, from the-- _Spaceballs_?“

“Oh, shit, that was quick,” Beck says. “Listen, I’m not gonna...Sorry, what’s your name?”

“Peter,” Peter says, holding back on the surname.

“Peter, okay. Well, listen, Pete, I’m not gonna lie to you. I don’t like lying to my employees. So here it is: I provide my clients with the ideal partners to achieve the highest form of physical relief. You know what I’m talking about, I don’t have to spell it out for you. But I will. I will spell it out for you. Tomorrow night, 5,000 cash, and all you have to do is promise me you’re a virgin.”

“I...” Peter feels like he’s spinning out. “I have homework.”

“No one’s paying you 5,000 dollars to do fucking algebra,” for the first time, a shade of fury bleeds into Beck’s voice. “Come on, kid. All you have to do is lie back and take it.”

Peter thinks of May asleep in the other room, and the unpaid utility bills that she thinks he doesn’t know about piling up in the tin where she usually keeps her secret chocolate stash. He can help, he tells himself. Everyone has to lose their virginity sometime. Most people don’t even get the _option_ of doing it for money. This is a good thing. He’s lucky.

“Yeah,” he says, without deciding to say it. “Yeah, I’ll do it.”

“See?” Beck says, smiling so wide Peter can hear it. “What did I say? Smart kid.”

The next night, after the longest school day of Peter’s life, after he tells May he’s going to Ned’s to do homework and grabs a train into Manhattan, he stands in front of the door to a hotel room that costs more for a night than his apartment does for a month and doesn’t feel smart at all. He’s been thinking of Beck this whole time, picturing Beck and telling himself it won’t be that bad, but it’s not Beck on the other side of that door. Peter has no idea who it is. All he knows is it’s someone who’s willing to pay a lotof money to take the virginity of some kid they’ve never met. Peter’s in a pair of thrift store jeans and one of Ben’s old henleys. He’s never felt less prepared in his life.

As long as he doesn’t kill me, Peter tells himself. As long as he doesn’t kill me, I can take it.

He knocks on the door.

_& &&_

It’s good money, getting fucked.

Peter can’t think of it as _sex_ , he has to think of it as _getting fucked_. It’s deliberate, a choice he makes five minutes into that first night, while some middle aged john with hair plugs and sweaty hands paws at his fly and Peter feels his nipples pebble in the cold hotel air, shirtless in front of someone who isn’t his family or Ned for the first time in his life, while the john pushes him face-down into the mattress and presses into him with no prep and says, “ _Fuck_ , you’re tight.”

It’s not sex, he decides. He’s not losing his virginity, pinned under this stranger with tears pricking the corner of his eyes and muffled voices in the next room, he’s just getting fucked.

Peter leaves while the john is in the shower, and it’s not until he’s sitting on the train back to Queens (sitting instead of standing even though it hurts to sit because the man didn’t use a condom and he feels like if he stands out a whole rush of...of--is going to come out of him all inside his jeans) that he thinks to check his venmo account. There’s $5,000 dollars that wasn’t there before, from Beck, with a string of cherry emojis attached.

They sell Peter’s virginity five more times before he graduates high school. “Act virginal,” Beck always tells him, before he sends him in. “You know--blush, stutter, gasp like you’re being _touched for the very first time_ and all that shit. With those doe eyes it won’t take much.”

And it doesn’t take much. It takes nothing, in fact, because every time a john puts his hands on him he feels that same visceral shock of the first time all over again, that roiling in his gut that says how absolutely fucking against nature this is. There are no tender words, no locking eyes, no final coming together of two souls. Peter has an orgasm every time, but he’s so deep inside his own head when they hit him that he doesn’t even feel it. He just feels the intrusion of something foreign inside him and his back sliding in short jerks up the hotel bedspread and this mounting, maddening pressure.

Parker luck, he thinks ruefully, the first time a john hits him.

He tells May that he won the money in school contests, science fair and academic decathalon and national essay competitions. She’s so proud, she never bothers to check up on them, on the fake names. She _does_ try to make him keep the money, save it up for college, but he insists that they use what they need, and then when that doesn’t work he starts paying bills behind her back. He got a scholarship for high school, he says. He can get one for college, too.

The first time a john hits him, he hits back, and Beck refuses to give him his share of the money. “You can’t hit the _fucking client!”_ he roars, in a rage. “What did I tell you? All you have to do is lie back and _goddamn take it._ If the client doesn’t cum, you don’t get a red fucking cent.”

Becoming Spider-Man makes it all feel like a big practical joke.

The spider gets him while he’s on his knees in a private Oscorp lab, and he nearly bites Norman Osborn’s cock off. But he doesn’t--he finishes the job, lets the old man cum down his throat, collects his $2,000 (prices have dropped drastically since he hit his growth spurt), and spends half of the next week wrapped around one of the toilets in his gross dormitory bathroom, literally _stuck_ to the ceramic, feeling like he’s going to die. May sends a care package, but by the time he actually makes it back to his room and collapses in a pile of blankets he’s too out of it to do anything but lie on his cement floor and poke at the outside of the sealed cardboard box.

It’s cookies, he finds out, when he finally gets the strength to open it. Really bad cookies that taste like mandarin oranges and white chocolate, a gallon of tamiflu, and a box of condoms with a post-it note that says “Stay safe!!!”

Peter stares at the box for a full minute, then snorts a laugh.

“Safe,” he mutters. “Sure, May. _Safe_.”

Having superpowers is fun, at least, once he gets the hang of them and stops swinging into the sides of buildings. Certainly more fun than he’s ever had on his back, though no one’s paying him to stop crimes and save cats from trees. Still, he figures, everyone does what they have to do to stay sane. May’s purchases and accidentally murders adorable succulents, Ned gets back together and breaks up with Betty three times a week, and Peter webs criminals to the side of the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s therapeutic. It’s his escape.

Besides, if Peter’s going to turn up dead, he has a feeling it will be at his _other_ job.

_& &&_

Tony hasn’t been to a party like this in almost a decade.

He’s a reformed man. A recovering party animal, recovering alcoholic, recovering playboy. The only reason he’s here at all, mingling with CEOs, Defense Department reps, foreign dignitaries, and the hookers they’ve hired to service them, is because they had good intel that Spider-Man was going to be here tonight, and Steve insisted he and Nat run recon since they were the only ones who could possibly blend in, Tony was the only one with a standing invitation, he needed to stop moping about Pepper dumping him, it was _months_ ago, important mission, blah blah blah.

Nat seems like she has the “recon” portion of the night covered, so Tony ducks out from under the grabby hands of a couple of bottle-blonde escorts of the not-so-classy variety and makes his escape to the bar--not for a drink, just for a napkin. “Tony,” Steve starts, in his ear, “you’re supposed to--“ but Tony scoops the comm out and drops it in his pocket. The problem he’d been working on in the lab when Steve dragged him unceremoniously out into the world is still buzzing around in his head, begging to be solved (if he doesn’t solve it, he knows he won’t sleep tonight), so he grabs a pen and starts working it out, chewing on an olive.

“You missed something,” says a voice over his shoulder. “Here.”

The pen disappears, then the napkin, and a second later the whole problem slides back to him across the bartop, solved. He stares at it for a long moment, shocked.“Huh.”

Tony half expects to see Reed Richards when he looks up, because no one else can really give him a run for his money in the mathematics department, but it’s not Reed. It’s a kid--not more than twenty, twenty-one, leaning back against the bar and looking existentially uncomfortable in a pair of tailored slacks and a dress shirt unbuttoned at the throat.

“What are you?” Tony asks. “Some sort of trust fund child prodigy? Brain atrophying while you flit from club to club looking for quantum equations to solve?”

The kid smiles a little, but just a little. “No. I’m tonight’s entertainment. If you want.”

It takes Tony a split second to put it together.

He’s a hooker. The kid who just did PhD level quantum physics on a bar napkin is a hooker. And judging by how tense he is, not a very good one.

“I want,” Tony says, without thinking.

The kid looks startled. “Really? I mean, I didn’t think, with the whole Avengers thing...”

“Not for sex,” Tony clarifies. “Come home with me, I want your mind.”

If anything, the kid’s eyes widen even more. “I don’t know. I’ve got a quota--“

“I’ll pay you triple whatever it is.” Tony realizes he sounds overeager, but he hasn’t met anyone who can keep up with him in so long. “Quadruple. Quintuple. Whatever you need, I can pay, and you won’t have to suck anyone’s dick. Promise.”

Tony can see the minute the kid gives in. Something goes out of him, like tension bleeding out of his shoulders, only it’s his whole person, his whole _essence_ , and Tony realizes that from the second he laid eyes on him, this kid has been on the defensive.

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll go home with you, Mr. Stark. For ten thousand.”

Tony’s eyebrows shoot up. “ _Ten?_ Make it an even hundred k, and you’ve got a deal.”

“No, I--“ the kid visibly swallows his protests. “Sure. Deal.”

But Tony can hear him muttering to himself on the way back to the tower, tucked into the plush rear seat of Tony’s self-driving Rolls, words like _jesus_ and _a hundred thousand_ and _backfire_ and, nonsensically, _Parker fucking luck_. Tony lets him get it out of his system for a few blocks, pulling up projects back in the lab on his smart glasses, then shuts everything down with a flick of his wrist and says, “Okay, kid, you need to relax.”

“Sorry.” The kid visibly tries to let his muscles melt into the seat, and Tony’s struck with the painful image of him underneath some anonymous man, trying to do the same thing.

“No, I mean--you need to be more comfortable. We need to make you more comfortable, there’s no way you can work like this. How about twenty questions?”

“Twenty questions?”

“Yeah,” Tony flashes him a smile. “Come on, this is an opportunity few are ever afforded. Ask me anything. I’ll tell you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

The kid opens his mouth to protest again, seems to change his mind mid-word and blurts out, “What were you doing at that party?”

For a half a second, Tony pictures Steve’s face and feels the annoying _zzzzz_ of a rant about sharing classified Avengers secrets with a random hooker. Then he decides, since Spider-Man never showed up anyways, no harm no foul. Anyways, there’s something about this kind of party, about brushing elbows with humanity’s worst, that fills him with a knee-jerk kind of radical honesty. He meets one real person and he wants to tell them about losing his fucking virginity.

“Looking for Spider-Man,” he tells the kid. He doesn’t miss the way he tenses up again at that, but he doesn’t say anything, either. “But he didn’t show.”

“How do you know he didn’t show?”

“Are you using that as your second question? Would you like to reconsider?”

“That’s not a second question, it’s an addendum.”

“I’m sorry, it’s a _what?_ I wasn’t aware this was the special LSAT prep edition--”

“Shut up, you’re a genius, you know what an addendum is.“

“Uh, I also know that it’s _my_ turn, okay? And there are no addendums in baseball.”

“Okay, okay. Ask your question.”

The kid’s smiling again, but it’s more honest than back at the party, more like a mistake, something that he’s not doing on purpose. Tony tries to ignore how there’s something golden and bright bubbling up inside him, but it’s hard. He hasn’t felt it in a while.

His voice is gentle when he asks his question. “What’s your name?”

A hesitant pause. Then, “Peter.”

“Peter,” Tony repeats, almost reverent. “Yeah, that’s...You look like a Peter.”

“What’s a Peter look like?”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but...you.”

The kid-- _Peter_ \--breaks out in a real laugh, nose scrunched in a way that’s fucking _adorable_ , and all at once (the Rolls gliding down a near-empty street, watery glass facades of skyscrapers shimmering past outside, turning his smart glasses over absently in his hands) Tony knows that he’s crossed over some sort of threshhold. It’s the same feeling he got in his grungy basement lab at MIT, when he turned JARVIS on for the first time. The same feeling he got at that press conference in ’08, right before he put the cards down and said, _I am Iron Man._ The same feeling he got in the Battle of New York, when the Avengers finally stood together as a team.

Somehow, Peter is what he’s been waiting on. The next phase of Tony’s life.

_& &&_

By sunrise, Tony can’t really fathom ever letting him walk out the door.

Peter’s proven ten times over that his math skills at the party weren’t a fluke. He catches one mistake that would’ve made Tony’s repulsors melt his boots, and another that would’ve caused Clint’s arrows to explode mid-arc. He _also_ catches cheetos in his mouth when Tony starts flicking them wildly across the lab, and he doesn’t make one single comment about lab safety. Tony’s platonically in love by the time he convinces Peter to borrow some sweatpants and a t-shirt, and then the kid comes out of the bathroom in Tony’s clothes and he’s in a different sort of love altogether. He’s never felt anything like this before, and certainly not so fast.

Twenty questions gets them back to the tower, and then from the garage up to the lab (“Who can fly faster, you or Thor?” Peter asks in the elevator, and Tony spends a minute spluttering indignantly before he admits, “Thor.”). It gets them through the awkward early stages of learning how to work together (“Are you in college?” Tony asks, flicking open work files to Peter across the holo-table, and watches Peter weigh the dangers of revealing personal information before he says, “Yeah. I’m doing biomedical engineering at NYU.”).

“How do you reduce the effect of acceleration inside the suit?” Peter asks, once he’s settled in with sweatpants and cheeto dust under his nails. “I mean, with the number of gees you’re pulling, you should be passing out basically at take off, but you’re fine.”

“Come on, no science questions,” Tony pinches a holographic model of Nat’s widow bites and drags to enlarge it. “I’ll give you those for free, later. Ask me something juicy.”

“Fine,” Peter rolls his eyes. “Uh, are you and Captain America sleeping together?”

Tony chokes on a cheeto. “What?”

“There are rumors about the _electric_ tension between you--“

“No,” Tony says, as vehemently as he can manage. “No, we’re not _sleeping together_. I’m pretty sure that would be like having sex with the tomb of the unknown soldier, and anyways he’s like--ninety years old. Seriously, he’s a _very_ old man.”

Peter gives him a look that says, without words, you’re an old man.

“Excuse you.” Tony points a finger. “I’ll have you know, I’m a very spry forty-four.”

“Sure,” Peter says, disbelieving. “Go on, ask your question.”

“Hmm,” Tony taps his chin, spins his chair out away from the desk. “Favorite movie?”

“ _Ghostbusters,_ ” Peter answers. “The really old one, from the eighties.”

Tony groans. “ _Really old_ , he says, jesus--“

“What’s the worst thing you ever did?” Peter asks in a rush, and then falls abruptly silent.

Tony stares at him for a long moment.

Peter looks scared of the answer, but not like he regrets asking it, and Tony feels a staggering wave of affection crash over him, because what must this kid have gone through in his life to get to here, this point where he feels the need to vet people for cruelty. It makes Tony blindingly mad all of a sudden, not that Peter would ask that but that he would even _think_ to, when most people would be asking Tony about his cars or his bots or all the actresses he’s slept with.

But Peter thought to ask it, and he asked it, and now he’s waiting for an answer, and Tony won’t lie to him. “I got my best friend paralyzed,” he says. “Among many, many other things.”

Peter looks down. “I’m sorry--“

“No, don’t be.” Tony flashes him a smile that’s meant to be reassuring but probably just comes off pre-packaged, fake. “Moving on. What’s something you can’t do, that you wish you could?”

“Whistle,” Peter answers immediately.

“What, really? I was expecting, like--flying, or turning invisible, or something.”

“Nope. I want to whistle.”

“How come?”

“Is that an addendum?” Peter jokes, and before Tony can argue, “I don’t know, it just always seemed fun. I can’t sing, but my uncle used to whistle.”

“I can’t help you. Not a whistler, myself. But it seems like a skillset Steve would have, if you--“

“No,” Peter interrupts. “No, it’s fine. I don’t wanna bug Captain America.”

“Oh, but you’ll bug Iron Man. I see how it is.”

Peter grins a little, but he doesn’t take that as meaning Tony wants him to leave, because two hours into their acquaintance he can already interpret all of Tony’s mannerisms, his slight tones of voice that took Pepper years as his personal assistant to master. Rhodey’s the only other person Tony’s clicked with like this before, and that was three fucking decades ago.

“Hmm,” Peter hums, considering his next question. “Okay, this is a hard one. Cats or dogs?”

“Cats,” Tony says. No hesitation.

“Really? Because there’s that picture of you with the chihuahuas in the baby bjorns--“

“Those were Paris Hilton’s chihuahuas, she _abandoned_ them on a craps table at the MGM Grand. What was I supposed to do, leave them there?”

“No, I guess not,” Peter laughs. “I’m a dog person. I’ll give you that one for free.”

He flips a stylus between his fingers and scrawls a few lines of _very_ advanced math on the holo in front of him like he’s jotting down a grocery list. Before Tony’s brain can catch up with his mouth, he hears himself ask, “How much would it cost for you to quit your job?”

Peter opens his mouth, probably to say _fuck you_ , but Tony hears how bad that sounds a second after he says it, and rushes to amend, “Not that I have anything against sex work as a profession, but in my mind it has to be something you choose to do, consciously, and it seems like--feel free to punch me if I’m out of line, here, but it seems like this isn’t something you chose.”

Peter’s quiet for a long minute. Tony really hopes he doesn’t decide to leave, because he knows in this moment that there’s nothing he can really do to stop him. And he doesn’t want him to leave.

“I don’t know,” Peter says, at last.

“You don’t know--“

“How much it would cost. Definitely more than I can afford.”

“But not more than I can afford.”

Peter’s eyes snap to his face. He looks so, so young, and all Tony wants to do is feed him lots of cheetos and pay for his college and maybe invite him to move in and stay forever. Peter must see some of that alarming intensity in his gaze, because he looks away. “I can’t ask you to do that. You met me like--I don’t know, like three hours ago. You’re already paying me more money than I’ve ever seen in my life, I can’t ask for more.”

“You’re not asking,” Tony leans in, closer. “But you want out, don’t you?”

“Of course I--“ Peter starts, furious, then reins himself back. “Of course I want out. If I could stop going out and getting fucked by some random asshole who’s rich as god every night, you think I’d still be doing it?”

“No, kid, of course not.“

“But I have to make money, Mr. Stark. Even with student loans, college is expensive, and I have to eat, and pay rent, and my aunt has medical bills, and--“

“I’ll pay for it,” Tony says, easy as anything, because it is. It’s a drop of water in the ocean.

“And what do I have to let you do to me?”

Tony’s heart stutters. “What?”

“What do I have to let you do to me, to get that kind of money?”

“Nothing,” Tony says, shocked. “I’d never ask you for anything like that, Pete. Never.”

Peter’s eyes are red and watery, and Tony recognizes the determined set of his mouth from all the time he spent holding back tears in his teens and twenties, muscling everything down so he could go out and smile for charity events and family dinners and photo ops. All of a sudden he imagines Peter with this expression and someone’s rough hands on him in an anonymous hotel room, and for a flash he wishes he hadn’t shut down the weapons division at SI because he wants to _murder_ someone. He wants someone to fucking _suffer_ for this.

“Okay,” Peter says, so quietly Tony can barely hear him. “Yeah. Get me out.”

_& &&_

Peter should’ve known it was too good to be true.

Really. Billionaire superhero meets down on his luck hooker, offers to pay for college after one night of math problems and radical honesty. It sounds more like a movie than real life. But it’s Tony Stark, who Peter’s looked up to since he was in fucking elementary school, the guy who inspired Peter to use his powers to become a superhero, and idiotically, Peter trusts that because it’s him, because it’s Tony Stark offering to save him, everything’s going to turn out okay.

He doesn’t count on Beck knowing about Spider-Man.

“Think about it, Peter,” Beck says, across the table in a crowded coffee shop. “You quit, I tell the world you’re Spider-Man, what’s that gonna do to you? It’s certainly not going to help your reputation, with J. Jonah Jameson out there every day calling you a whore.”

If Peter didn’t know better by now, he’d say Beck sounds almost sympathetic. But he knows better.

“And don’t forget your aunt,” Beck adds. “What would happen to her, if every bad guy in the city suddenly knew what she meant to you? And your friends? Your neighbors?”

“I get it,” Peter cuts in. He hates how small he feels. “Sorry. Forget I said anything.”

“Oh, I don’t know if I can do that, Peter.” Beck shakes his head ruefully, turning his empty mug around and around on the little plate, ceramic grinding. “Depends how merciful I’m feeling. Your next couple clients aren’t gonna be fun ones, I can tell you that.”

“Sorry,” Peter says again.

There’s no time to worry about how Beck found out about Spider-Man. Peter has classes and lab timeand papers to write, not to mention he’s locked in an unfortunate game of cat and mouse with Green Goblin where he can’t figure out if he’s the cat or the mouse. He ignores Tony’s calls but wears the t-shirt he stole from him under his jacket to class every day because it makes him feel safe. He’s fine, it’s the same routine he’s been living for the last six years, Einstein got four hours of sleep a night but Peter only gets two, a client ties him up for so long that it hurts to raise his arms above his shoulders for a week even with his advanced healing, he’s dealt with worse, only now he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and knows it’s never going to end.

He’s trapped. What started as one dumb mistake when he was fifteen has grown to swallow his entire existence. He can’t let the world know Spider-Man spreads his legs for anyone willing to shell out a thousand bucks, he can’t put May or Ned in danger, and he can’t quit being a superhero because it’s the only thing that gets him through the day.

“I’m fine,” he tells his professors, when they ask about the bags under his eyes.

“Fine,” he tells May, when she asks about his job as a TA.

“Plenty,” he tells Ned, when he asks if Peter’s getting any action. “Trust me, plenty.”

The day he tries to quit, he leaves the coffee shop where he met Beck, goes to the closest skyscraper he can find, pulls his mask on with his street clothes and scales the side of it. When he gets to the top, he perches on the communications antenna and stares out at the island of Manhattan spread out underneath him like a kid’s toy train set, breathing hard and blustery and feeling this insane, unbearable pressure rising in his chest, like every unfair thing that’s ever happened to him, every time he’s ever gotten his hopes up only to have them stomped back to the sidewalk--it’s all piling up on his diaphragm, pushing and pushing against his lungs until he has to rip his mask off and yell, _“FUCK! FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKING FUCK!”_

The next day, J. Jonah Jameson runs a story with the headline, _Spider-Man Corrupts City with Foul Language._ Peter prints it out and tapes it to his dorm room wall.

And if he sort of misses Tony, it’s the least of his problems. He only knew the guy for one night (not counting a few quick fly-bys in the middle of messy alien invasions). He’s got no reason to daydream about the way Tony’s eyes crinkle when he smiles or how he talks with his hands or how, standing close together in the vestibule leading out to the street while they waited for Tony’s self-driving Rolls to come around the corner, sheltered from the cold draft of outside air by the sturdy trunk of Tony’s body, Peter felt the safest he could remember feeling since he was small enough to climb in bed with May and Ben after a nightmare.

He can’t accept Tony’s offer to pay for school if he keeps working for Beck, and he can’t stop.

It doesn’t matter that it’s going to kill him. It’s fine.

_& &&_

Tony knocks on his dorm room door at three in the morning.

It’s a minor miracle that Peter’s not wearing the sweatpants he stole from the tower, or the boxer briefs Ned got him for his last birthday, the red and gold ones that say IRON ASS on the back. His room looks like a tornado might’ve whipped through it in the last twenty-four to forty-eight hours, but at least his spider suit is stashed in the super secret hiding place (a trash bag shoved between his mattress and the bedframe).

Still, there’s precious little dignity to be had in standing in the door half-naked, squinting in the bright lights from the hall with what he’s sure is a wicked case of bedhead, in front of a fucking Avenger. “Uh,” he says. “Mr. Stark?”

“I respect that you’re trying to ghost me,” Tony starts. “But it’s a science problem.”

“I’m not--“ Peter starts to say, then changes his mind. “What kind of science problem?”

“Interdimensional,” Tony says. “Can you come?”

Peter got back from seeing a client less than an hour ago, and he has to be up for class at seven. This is the greatest opportunity he’s had to actually get some good, uninterrupted sleep for as long as he can remember, but Tony Stark came to him with an interdimensional problem, and he can’t exactly say no, can he?

“I can pay you,” Tony offers, when Peter’s been silent for too long. “A hundred thousand again--“

“No,” Peter says, panicked. “No, you don’t have to pay me. I’ll come, just--let me put a shirt on, okay?”

So Tony putzes around in the hallway while Peter tries to scrounge up some clean clothes (a rumpled flannel and some track pants that ended up in his wash and may or may not belong to one of the girls that live on this floor). It’s mildly surreal, in a very different way than having $100,000 in his bank account is surreal, but sort of surreal in the same way it was when Liz agreed to go to homecoming with him freshman year. Or--no, that’s not quite right, because there was a fundamental level of nervousness there that isn’t here now. Tony standing in front of a bulletin board about safe sex and ice cream socials doesn’t make him feel nervous, the prospect of spending another night in the lab doesn’t make him feel nervous. It all just makes him feel like he stepped into someone else’s life. Warm, and happy.

It only takes them a couple of hours to solve Tony’s interdimensional math problem, but while the Fantastic Four zip off to retrieve one of their own from the Negative Zone, Peter lingers. He doesn’t want to go.

“I wasn’t ghosting you,” he tells Tony, folding the tab on a can of redbull back and forth just to have something to do with his hands. “I just didn’t want to have to explain.”

“Explain what?”

Peter looks for anger in Tony’s expression. He doesn’t find it. “I tried to quit,” he admits. “But my--my boss, he knows some things about me that I don’t want to get out.”

“He’s blackmailing you?”

“I mean, I guess. Technically. Yeah.”

“Okay.” Tony pops out of his chair and starts pacing, one hand holding his chin. “Here’s what we’re gonna do. You give me his name, and I’ll get you something to leverage back.”

Peter’s lost the thread. “What?”

“We’re gonna blackmail your blackmailer. It’s fine, I used to do this all the time at SI.”

Peter’s shaking his head. “No. No way, I don’t want to make it worse.” And, more importantly, he doesn’t want Tony to find out _Peter’s_ the one he was looking for at that party.

“Look, kid, I’m not gonna let someone force you into--into _selling yourself_.”

“Why not?” Peter asks.

Tony stops pacing, poleaxed. “What?”

“Why not?” Peter repeats. “I’m not anyone to you, I’m just some hooker you met at a party who happens to be really good at math--“

“Come on, Pete,” Tony says, sounding exhausted. “Don’t tell me you don’t feel any of this.”

Peter crosses his arms, stubborn to the last. “Any of what?”

“This.” Tony gestures eloquently between them. “It’s...I’ve never felt this comfortable with anyone in my entire life. There’s no way this isn’t how it’s supposed to be.”

Peter laughs, because the alternative is crying. “I’ve known you for like, a cumulative four hours.”

“So what? I only needed five minutes.” Tony comes back over and sits down in the chair in front of Peter, reaches out for a second like he wants to touch him and then retracts his hand. Peter wants to grab onto him, but he’s got no experience with relationships that don’t involve payment for services rendered, so he doesn’t. “Here’s the deal,” Tony continues, “and this, look, I know this is gonna sound crazy, but hear me out.”

Peter nods mutely, not trusting himself to speak with Tony so close by.

Tony’s eyes are very, very earnest. “I’m all in, Pete. Anything you need, any help, any money. And I--shit, I know this is how predators talk to kids on the internet, but for some reason I care about you and I want to make sure you’re safe and you have what you need, so anything--whatever weight you want to put on me, I’ll take it.”

For a split second, Peter wants to tell him. He wants to open his mouth and say _I’m Spider-Man,_ and let Tony take care of everything that comes after, take care of Beck and May and the press and saving the world. But the last time he listened to this vulnerable, scared gut instinct over his rational mind, he landed himself a job as a high-class whore.

“I can’t,” he says, voice cracking. “I can’t tell you what he has on me.”

Tony drops his head in his hands, and Peter feels the loss of his gaze like a lead pipe to the gut.

“But I--“ he starts, and then has to come up with something to say mid-sentence, since all he’s really thinking about is getting Tony to look at him again. “I haven’t ever had someone I could talk to about my job.”

Tony doesn’t quite brighten, but he sits up with a renewed sense of purpose. “I can do that.”

Peter smiles tentatively. “Twenty questions?”

“Sure, kid. Twenty questions.”

Which is how he ends up on Tony’s huge, comfortable couch with _Airplane!_ playing quietly on a projector and the New York skyline lightening outside massive panoramic windows, tucked under a blanket that probably costs more than his entire wardrobe and watching the way the golden morning sun plays off Tony’s hair.

“You go first, kid,” Tony says. He’s slumped into the back of the couch, face somewhere near Peter’s shoulder. “Ask me for company secrets, I’m too tired to lie.”

“Do you ever have nightmares?” Peter asks, instead.

Tony’s quiet for a moment. Peter doesn’t turn to look, giving him his privacy while he formulates an answer. In the movie, Leslie Nielsen is saying _Don’t call me Shirley!_ Peter can feel Tony’s shoulder just barely pressing his side under the blanket, the warmth of his body and the easy cadence of his breathing, and suddenly Peter’s hyperaware of every tiny piece of his body, of Tony’s body next to him, the slight musky smell of his breath (neither of them stopped to brush their teeth last night), the depression of his body weight in the couch pillows.

“Yeah,” Tony answers, at last. “Lots.” He doesn’t elaborate, and Peter doesn’t ask him to.

“Your turn,” Peter murmurs.

Tony wiggles a little, moving up the couch. “How long have you been a prostitute?”

“Uh, the polite term is _escort._ ”

“I’m sorry. How long have you been an _escort?”_

“Since I was fifteen.” Peter swallows a rising swell of fear, to be telling someone this. “I sold my virginity.”

Tony makes a noise like he’s hurt.

Peter does look down at him, then. His hand is over his eyes, and when Peter detangles from his blanket and reaches over to pull it down, there are tears smeared across his cheeks. “Hey,” Peter says. “You don’t have to--It’s fine. It was a long time ago, I needed the money.”

“Where was I?” Tony says, more to himself than Peter. “Jesus, what the hell was I doing while you were letting some asshole rape you for chump change.”

The word _rape_ hits Peter like a speeding train.

It’s his turn to ask another question, but instead he sinks down into the couch so he’s level with Tony and leans his head against his shoulder. After a minute, Tony reaches for Peter’s hand and squeezes it, then tilts his head to rest on top of Peter’s. For the first time since he was fifteen, Peter thinks about a man’s mouth and feels his breath quicken in a good way. He thinks about turning his lips into Tony’s hair and kissing the side of his face and maybe biting at the soft, bristly underside of his jaw, and then feels something molten sinking in his stomach and has to stop thinking about Tony and mouths and taste to keep from embarrassing himself in his too-tight ladies’ track pants.

He’s never really wanted someone before, not since he was fifteen, not in an adult way.

But right now, he wants Tony.

_& &&_

Peter’s on the job when the Doombots start streaming out of the sky.

He sees the portal open from the penthouse of a high-end hotel on the Upper East Side, halfway through taking his pants off while a john with hair whiter than his smile makes one-sided small talk at the wet bar behind him. There are screams already drifting up faintly from the street, and in the distance, Peter can see the bloom of an explosion in Central Park. It’s gonna be all hands on deck for this one, he can already tell, but Beck’s got him rented out for the rest of the afternoon.

The john comes up behind Peter with two glasses of champagne. Peter holds his belt in one hand and watches Iron Man and the Falcon swoop past the Empire State building heading for the action, and when he feels the john’s breath on the back of his neck something inside him _snaps_.

He doesn’t belong here, about to get on his hands and knees so some entitled douche can use him as a glorifed masturbatory object. He belongs out there, with the Avengers and the Fantastic Four and whoever else decides to show up to save the city of New York.

“You know what,” he steps out of the john’s grasp and threads his belt back through the loops. “Tell Beck I quit.”

When he reaches the elevator, he hits the button for the roof.

He swings across Times Square just in time to keep Tony from careening straight through a jumbotron, swinging him back on course with a shot of webbing to the ankle. Tony salutes him as he speeds past, and his filtered voice shouts, “Spidey! You’re on civilian duty!” before he spirals away down the wide canyon of 7th Avenue.

“You’re welcome!” Peter shouts after him.

Fighting those Doombots is the freest Peter’s ever felt. He knows he’s in for a world of shit once the fight is over and Beck does whatever he’s been planning to do, but right now nobody on earth owns Peter. Not a john, not his fucking pimp, not student loans, not medical bills, nothing. And he doesn’t know why, but even though Tony doesn’t know he’s Spider-Man, doesn’t know Peter’s essentially been lying to his face for as long as they’ve known each other, Peter believes wholeheartedly that when Tony said he was all in, he meant it.

Which is why, the second the battle’s over and the dust starts to settle, Peter aims himself towards the Avengers field camp. It’s bustling with men in suits and superheroes with dirt and blood smeared on their faces. Peter sees Captain America holding pressure on a wound in Black Widow’s thigh, the Falcon yelling at some guy with long hair and runny eyeliner, and Hawkeye trying to soothe the Hulk (sitting cross-legged like a kindergarten student) with what looks like a shadow puppet bird. None of them are the one person he’s looking for, so Peter pushes through the crowd until he finds where a bunch of nerds in a giant field tent are tearing apart dying Doombots, and--there he is.

“Tony!” he calls from the tent opening, then weaves around a few people carrying a Doombot that’s still spitting sparks and wriggling. “Hey, Tony!”

Tony--suit still on but helmet open--looks over from where he’s elbow-deep in a bot. “Kinda busy, Spidey!”

Peter jogs up to the exam table. “Can I help?”

“Only if you know what a Doombot’s processing cortex is supposed to look like. I swear to god he’s got it programmed to move around when I’m not looking.”

Peter reaches inside the bot’s cracked open head and yanks loose the piece Tony’s looking for.

“Huh,” Tony says, staring at him. “Would you look at that.”

He pulls his hands out of the Doombot’s guts and makes grabby hands at the cortex. Peter hands it over wordlessly, then trails after Tony as he heads for one of the impromptu holo workstations along the tent’s perimiter. “Look, Spidey,” Tony says over his shoulder, “thanks for the help, but I really need to get on this, and unless you secretly know Latverian code--“

“Sure, I can help,” Peter says. “But first, I need to--Tony.”

He grabs Tony’s shoulders and turns him to face him. Peter’s so much smaller than him in the suit that it feels almost comical, staring up into his face and trying to command attention.

“First,” he says seriously, “I need to tell you what my pimp was blackmailing me with.”

He can see the exact moment Tony gets it. It’s like an electric shock goes through his body, mild enough that Peter can really only see it in the way his face tenses, just slightly. “Peter?”

“Yeah,” Peter says. “Listen, I need your help with my aunt. You know that security system you were showing me?”

“With the--“

“The automatic biological panic button, yeah.”

“That’s still _deep_ in beta.”

“Do you think we can get it out of beta? Like, tonight?”

Tony grins. “For you, Pete? Sure.”

And really, Peter should’ve known. He’s known Tony for barely any time at all, but he should’ve known that telling him he was Spider-Man would be the easiest thing in the world.

They fall into their familiar rhythm as quick as anything, disassembling the Doombots and analyzing their parts faster than the entire team of two dozen spooks in lab coats combined, Peter flying through Latverian code while Tony tears the sleek machinery of the bots apart piece by piece, looking for their transponders. They anticipate each other like they’re sharing the same fucking brain, even when the Doombots they thought were deactivated come back to life and tear the camp apart and the only three people left to fight them are Tony, Peter, and some guy named Scott. They fight together the same way they work together, the same way they talk together, and Peter can’t help but think, while Tony flies him up over a swarm of Doombots and drops him into the heart of it--what would this feel like, in bed.

Every heartbeat, Peter falling. And every heartbeat, Tony rising to meet him.

_& &&_

The first time Peter kisses him, Tony panics.

It’s the third day in a row they’ve pulled an all-nighter, working on Peter’s new AI down in the lab. The sun’s rising on something like seventy-two hours without sleep, they’re drifting half-awake back to their requisite bedrooms in the penthouse, arguing halfheartedly about whether you could, theoretically, design a car that runs on banana juice--both of them agreeing that you could, definitely, but not agreeing on _how_ \--and Peter’s wearing the shirt that Tony loaned him that first night they met, he showed up wearing it, probably not even remembering where he got it, and Tony thinks it’s an exquisite sort of torture, walking past bedroom doors with Peter so soft and rumpled and _near_.

Peter kissing him, though. That’s not torture at all. It’s like...that soft pink color that artists always used to paint cherubs, the clouds around angels, the heavenly pastel maelstrom of a Rococo ceiling. Tony holds Peter’s head carefully between his hands and steps into him and kisses back, loses himself for long minutes before he realizes what he’s _doing_.

He pulls back. His heart pounds. “Peter. You--”

“I know I don’t have to,” Peter interrupts, reading his mind. “I know. And if you don’t want to, that’s okay, but I haven’t wanted anyone in so long, not really, and you...you’re all I can think about.”

“Pete,” Tony murmurs.

“Please.” Peter holds tight to the front of his shirt. “Please don’t say no.”

“I’m not. I won’t ever say no to you, kid. Actually, I kind of want to ask you to stay forever.”

Peter smiles. “Okay.”

Tony’s heart clenches. “What?”

“Okay,” Peter repeats. “I’ll stay forever.”

And Tony can’t do anything, really, except press Peter back into the wall and kiss him again.

There are complications, of course, but not really. Not in any way that matters. Peter’s not simple, but choosing to be with him is. It’s the simplest choice Tony’s ever made, battening down the hatches with Peter and weathering every storm that comes their way, nightmares and angry press and the morality police, alien invasions and deranged mad scientists and tense nights in medical holding tight to hands and praying, _begging_ , each time the heart monitor blips, that it won’t be the last. Tony’s not going anywhere, he’s never going anywhere, and he’d never dream of loving anyobody else.

At a charity gala in the spring, Tony’s in the middle of telling Peter a story about Justin Hammer and a really unlucky Elvis impersonator when Peter stops laughing and abruptly freezes, staring at something across the room. “What is it?” Tony asks, and tries to follow his gaze, but all he sees is the usual sea of schmoozers and phonies, Steve in his dress uniform and Nat in a floor length gold evening gown. “Pete?”

“He’s here,” Peter says, hollow. “My...my old boss.”

Tony’s stomach drops out through his shoes. He can feel himself tearing in two, half of him wanting to bundle Peter back to the penthouse so he can wrap him up in ninety-seven blankets and maybe the emergency Iron Egg crush pod he’s been working on since he found out about the Vulture incident, the other half wanting to march over there with fucking _Spider-Man_ at his side to beat the pulp out of a guy who preys on unsuspecting children.

The murderous side wins out. “Where is he?” Tony asks. “Point to him, I’ll kill him.”

“I’m not gonna _point to him,_ ” Peter hisses.

“Fine, yell his name, when he turns around I’ll see who it is.”

“ _No_ ,” Peter says, giving Tony a stern look. “You’re not killing him, Tony, don’t be stupid.”

“Kid, I hate to break it to you, but I’m going to kill that man.” Tony takes Peter’s face in his hands, not caring one single whit about all the disapproving upper-class looks they’re getting from the people around them, and makes Peter look in his eyes, so he can tell that Tony is telling the absolute truth. “He hurt you, he took advantage of you and he trapped you and he made you do things you didn’t want to do, and I will fucking kill him for that.”

Peter’s hands wrap around his wrists. “Hey. It’s all okay now, Tony. I’m here, with you.”

Anger swells. “And he’s right fucking there--“

“Let’s just go home,” Peter interrupts forcefully. “Can you just take me home?”

Tony holds onto his anger for another long moment, not wanting to let it go because without it he doesn’t feel like he has any agency, any way to help fix what happened to Peter before he knew him. It’s hard, but Peter’s asked him for something and Tony has to trust that he knows best what he needs for himself, he has to, because he’s been working on not ripping the reins out of Peter’s hands when they don’t agree, and there’s nothing Tony won’t do, no change or compromise he won’t make in his behavior, to make this work.

“Okay,” he says, at last. “Yeah, Pete. Let’s go home.”

Peter says _it’s all okay now,_ but Tony knows okay is a relative term. Peter’s still weird about sex, even more than Tony, with his vast sordid sexual history, is used to. It’s nothing bad, just--Peter doesn’t like dirty talk, doesn’t even like cursing in bed, he insists on keeping some sort of clothes on while they make love, even if it’s just socks, he likes to leave the tv on sometimes, or have sex in strange places, like on the kitchen floor or the hood of one of the cars in the garage or in the hallways on the lower office floors, after hours.

Tony asks him about it once, jokingly: “Are you working from some sort of bucket list?”

“No,” Peter says. “I just never got to pick, before. I never got to--participate, I guess. I like that it’s not perfect, with you. I don’t want it to have to be perfect.”

“Well,” Tony murmurs, voice breaking, “I can promise you, I’ll never be perfect.”

“Good,” Peter says, and climbs into his lap.

And if Tony digs up all the dirt he can on Quentin Beck using contacts left over from before his reformation and turns that information over to the requisite authorities, if he cashes in a favor that Nat owes him to make sure that when Beck shows up in prison it’s with a few fresh new scars, well--he’s only keeping his promise.

The first time Peter asks Tony to fuck him is a disaster. They don’t talk before, which is stupid, and Peter panics the second Tony starts fingering him, hyperventilating underneath him until Tony scrambles off him and he takes off like a shot for the en suite. Tony goes to sit by the door, confused and worried, and waits until he hears the water stop running to knock gently. Peter lets him in right away, teary and babbling apologies, and Tony ends up sitting on the bath mat with Peter wedged between his legs, listening to him talk and talk about how he never thought of what he did with his johns as sex, just “getting fucked,” and how he doesn’t want that with Tony, he doesn’t want there to be any cross-contamination.

“You don’t have to bottom,” Tony tells him, Peter’s hair in his mouth where his head is tucked under Tony’s chin. “It’s been a while, but I’m perfectly happy to do it. Or no fucking at all. I’d be happy to remain a celibate monk for the rest of my life if you keep giving me those nasty morning breath kisses.”

Peter snorts, too wrung out to laugh. “I don’t want to be celibate. I want you inside me, I just...”

“I have an idea.” Tony squeezes him bracingly. “Come on, up you go.”

The second time Peter asks Tony to fuck him, it’s after Tony’s been rimming him for _hours_ , after he’s come three times sobbing into the sheets, the whole gorgeous sweaty mess of him twisted in agonizing ecstasy. Shirt on, socks on, and Tony presses tender kisses to his flushed thighs while Peter says, “Hurry up, hurry up, _Tony_.”

It’s the greatest sex of Tony’s life, because it’s Peter. Peter coming apart in his arms, Peter collapsing against his chest, Peter hefting all this impossible unfair Atlas weight and letting Tony take half, letting Tony thread his fingers through his sweaty hair and kiss his shoulder through his t-shirt and say, “Twenty questions.”

“You go first,” Peter’s lips move over the side of his face, dragging against his beard.

“Remember the rules. No lying.”

“I remember the rules, Tony. We only play eight times a day.”

“Okay, good, because this is important. Did you eat the last double stuff oreo?”

Peter breaks into messy, helpless laughter. Tony kisses along his cheek until he reaches his mouth, so he can taste his tired, delighted smile, and murmurs, “Addendum: I love you.”

“I thought there were no addendums in baseball,” Peter says, but he’s smiling even wider. “Love you, too.”

It’s gonna kill him, Tony thinks, loving someone this much.

But that doesn’t matter. He can’t stop now, not even if he wanted to. And anyways-- _god_ , what a way to go.


End file.
